Hatari!
Hatari!
Kino Lorber
4K UHD Blu-ray
1962 – 157 Min.
Starring John Wayne, Red Buttons, Elsa Martinelli
Cinematography by Russell Harlan
Directed by Howard Hawks
Watching the animals of Hatari! in full flight is a politically incorrect thrill—though they’re running for their lives they have a majesty in motion that make the rampaging dinos of Jurassic Park seem like wind-up toys. Broken but unbowed, Hatari!‘s rhinos and giraffes embody a life force that puts their human co-stars to shame, a goon squad of rowdies dedicated to caging Africa’s most noble creatures.
Directed by Howard Hawks, Hatari! began production in Tanganyika in the fall of 1960, just a year before the country achieved its independence from British rule. Over the next 12 months Hollywood would take charge; John Wayne stars as the genial all-American hunter Sean Mercer, and Red Buttons is his diminutive sidekick “Pockets,” a Jiminy Cricket in safari drag. Among their co-conspirators are a carefully selected crop of Euro stars including Berliner Hardy Krüger as a wayward racing champ and Tuscany’s Elsa Martinelli as “Dallas” (how cute), a “famous” news photographer—both are fish out of water in more ways than one, but they helped give this extremely expensive Boy’s Life adventure a much-needed global appeal (it cost over 6 million to make, the equivalent of 60 million today).
The plot is only a plot in the loosest sense; screenwriter Leigh Brackett complained that Hawks “wasn’t buying stories” at that point in his career, “he wanted scenes.” Fair enough, many of those scenes of stampeding wildebeest and a set-to with one particularly fearless rhino are heart-stopping triumphs. But the dead on arrival dialog (much of it improvised), the never-ending macho one-upmanship, and the comic book characterizations (the Dell Movie comic is more nuanced than the film), are like cinematic tripwire.
Hawks’s greatest action scenes usually consisted of GIs or cowpokes trading good-natured insults, or better yet, a sleuth and a vamp in a high-wire verbal duel, the razor-sharp repartee flying faster than any of Hawks’s beloved jet fighters. In Hatari! all the action resides in speedy jeeps and the wildlife they’re chasing, once back at the compounds (fancy digs left behind by the British), the movie takes a nap. Brackett, who worked on both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo for Hawks, rolled with the punches and coughed up script pages that were more like suggestions—the cast arrived in Africa with nothing to work with but Hawks’s enthusiasm (this was the director’s vacation movie in much the way To Catch A Thief was Hitchcock’s).
One truly inspired aspect is Henry Mancini’s score. A master of mood music for bachelor pads and sophisticated comedies, Mancini’s lighter than air arrangements might seem too delicate in the face of a charging rhino but he crafted a nicely exotic soundscape (he must have been a fan of Martin Denny’s Exotica) that brings the animals a little closer to the tiki lounge while showing up the heavy-handed antics of Red Buttons and the shrill comedy revolving around Martinelli and her on-going seduction of the suddenly shy Wayne (to his credit the actor seems genuinely embarrassed by the young woman’s amorous attentions).
In The Big Sleep Hawks ran Bogart through a rumba line of nymphomaniacs yet he emerged relatively unscathed and none the worse for wear. In Hatari! the director infantilizes his leading man. An actor almost as complicated as Montgomery Clift, his co-star in Hawks’s Red River, Wayne was at his best as a statue to an imaginary ideal, an equally complicated American myth that he embodied with admirable dignity—in Hatari! he’s an innocent abroad. Though Wayne’s appearance was a pale shadow of Nathan Brittles or even Hondo, his benign performance in Hatari! became just another ingredient in the film’s success: with its puppy love romances and baby elephant antics, the whole family could flock to Howard Hawks’s latest. In that regard, the director’s intuition was right, ticket buyers would lap up the Disneyfication of The Duke.
Movie fans of any sort will find reason to lap up Kino Lorber’s new 4K release of Hatari!, it’s a beauty and shows off Russell Harlan’s sunburnt cinematography to a T—the 4K restoration (a standard Blu is included) doesn’t have “quite” the snap of recent 4K VistaVision releases like White Christmas or Gunfight at the OK Corral but nits will be picked. It’s advertised as a “16bit 4K Scan of the 35mm Original Camera Negative.” Included on the disc is a new audio commentary from film historian and essayist Julie Kirgo and writer/filmmaker Peter Hankoff.
Here’s the late, great Michael Schlesinger on Hatari!:
I think John Wayne should get remembered for the Playboy interview where he endorsed white supremacy, scorned the newfound acceptance of gays in movies, and insisted something like “the white people wanted to make a life for themselves in this land and the greedy Indians tried to hog everything”.
Hatari! is the greatest movie ever made!